It’s on CR and it’s pretty ok! Really flat voice acting, which I wish was Japanese. Apart from that it looks, moves, and sounds great. Really neat character designs. My only issue is that it sorta plays like an old rehash of scenes from Watanabe’s other shows, especially Zankyou No Terror. That war sequence is stunning though.

Coming off of the promos for 2049, it’s really nice to see some designs that feel like they’re taking the Blade Runner aesthetic somewhere new–an interpretation that pulls as much from the ideas behind the old designs as from the movie itself.

It is English only, with a very flat delivery style This year I rewatched all of his TV, and I honestly think his whole body of work doesn’t get a fair shake. There’s some extremely strong TV and beautiful little character moments all over his career.

This is both good and bad. As much as I think you’d have to change Blade Runner to make it work in 2017, theres an asshole Blade Runner Purist inside of me that, after this, has even less confidence that 2049 can pull it off.

Though I wish we were getting a whole movie about the main characters in this and not about Rick Deckard wannabe Ryan Gosling.

I love Kids on the Slope. It’s probably my #2 from Watanabe. But it doesn’t hold a candle to Bebop. I don’t think any of his shows are bad, they just aren’t Bebop. It’s kind of like how there’s “Do The Right Thing” and then there’s all other Spike Lee films. One clearly stands above the rest.

@BriBri I trust Watanabe to constantly deliver on great character moments in pretty much anything he makes. The thing he struggles with, in my view, is building a cohesive and impactful overarching narrative. He only really did it once with Bebop, and he’s even tried to retcon the ending of Bebop in more recent interviews.

The funny thing is, I’d argue that the episodic or smaller bits of Cowboy Bebop are stronger than the whole “narrative”. Seeing his characters interact against new strangers and seeing new sides of them that way is my favourite aspect of his work

This is getting off topic to the actual short though, so I’ll stop here!

I agree. I guess what I’m saying is that all of Watanabe’s shows have interesting episodic bits and character interaction, but Bebop is the only one that managed to string it all together into something grander.